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Traffic and Income Report: May 2016

Several Bloggers that I follow post Traffic and Income reports on a monthly basis; Pinch of Yum, Boho Berry, and My Love for Words. Three very different types of blogs, yet all focused on the same thing, which is a monthly look at what is and isn’t working for their blog.

These bloggers are transparent about how much traffic they get on their different social media platforms, what they have done in a given month that has worked, or not worked, to contribute to those statistics, and what goals they are setting for the next month. I love this idea.

Additionally, they are all making money using their blogs. While I don’t know that I will ever be in that position, I am an Amazon Associate, and who knows that the future will bring. Besides, someday I might be paid for my writing, as a guest blogger on another site and I think that would be something I would track here.

Anyways, starting a blog isn’t cheap, unless you go with somewhere like wordpress.com or blogger.com. I chose the self-hosted route, and my blog is hosted with wordpress.org. This allowed me more flexibility in customization, and to own my own domain name. If I were to go back and start over, I would have shopped around for a different hosting company, but my oldest son was helping me out, and he recommended Gandi.net. Up until I had to install WordPress, it was fairly easy. You can choose to either have a one, three, or five year contract with them, and I dreamt big and signed up for five.

With that I received:

5 mailboxes (email addresses)

1,000 forwarding addresses per domain (1,000 fake accounts that get forwarded to those five real addresses .. so I could set up an email address called sales@justplainbeth.com, which is a dummy address, but it would get forwarded to my actual email account)

1 SSL certificate per domain free for 1 year (that’s the little lock at the top of the address bar that makes me website secure)

50% discount on simple hosting for the first year (how I’m allowed to host WordPress on my domain)

I also received one website, and one free Ghandi blog, which I choose not to use.

My husband is an IT guy, and he was able to help walk me through installing WordPress on my domain. There are other domains that have WordPress already set up to be installed, and I might recommend that you look at those, especially if you are techno-challenged like I am. I did learn a lot however.

So, now that my blog has been out in the world for a full month, here’s where we stand. I am also going to be posting statistics for my other social media sites, which have grown over the last month, but for this first month, I am going to tell you where they were at the end of April, and then where they were at the end of May. Going forward, it will just be where they were at the end of month that just finished. Clear as mud, right? Also, going forward I’ll have some better data, but my blog is too new for that, so for now we just get a boring list.

Let’s start with the statistics first:

Blog Subscriptions: 10

Page Views: 886

Twitter: April: 50 May: 52 (I have not been very active on Twitter)

Pinterest: April: 32 May: 48 ( I just started this new page in January)

Instagram: April: 386 May: 428

Facebook: April: 41 May: 44 (Up until March I had 07- I’m pleased with these)

Here’s what I have paid out so far:

Gandi – for my domain: $65.90 for 5 years

Gandi – simple hosting for 1 year: $37.56

So that’s it. My goal for next month is to increase my page views, grow my social media following across all platforms, and maybe get a few more comments.

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